Over the last few years, information technology (IT) organizations have increasingly adopted standards and best practices to ensure efficient IT service delivery. In this context, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has been rapidly adopted as the de facto standard. ITIL defines a set of standard processes for the management of IT service delivery organized in processes for Service Delivery (Service Level Management, Capacity Management, Availability Management, IT Continuity Management and Financial Management) and Service Support (Release Management, Configuration Management, Incident Management, Problem Management and Change Management). The Service Support processes, such as Configuration Management, Incident Management, and Configuration Management are some of the more common processes IT organizations have implemented to bring their service to an acceptable level for their businesses.
The implementation of ITIL processes has yielded significant results to IT organizations by defining clear interfaces between service providers and consumers, by clarifying the IT organizational structures, roles, and responsibilities, and by designing internal processes for the management of IT operations. However, once ITIL processes are implemented, the effectiveness of the IT organization depends on the ability of the decision makers involved in those processes to make timely and accurate decisions. Hence, regardless of the quality of the process implementation, if inadequate decisions are made during the execution of those processes, they will result in poor customer experience and low value delivery. For instance, being able to prioritize a large volume of incidents based on their likely impact on the IT organization is key to running an efficient Incident Management process.
The challenge facing IT Service Management is to develop decision support capabilities that will enable decision makers to drive their management processes efficiently. An organizational structure and processes referred to as IT Governance can be used to define the strategy of the IT organization and oversee its execution to achieve the goals of the enterprise. One of the goals of IT Governance is to deliver IT services in alignment with business objectives. The business objectives are used as input to derive goals, objectives, and performance metrics needed to manage IT effectively. Auditing processes are used to measure and analyze the performance of the organization. A concept referred to as the Balanced Scorecard combines financial measures and non-financial measures in a single report and has been used as a strategic and performance measurement tool for IT Governance. However, the development of the balanced scorecard has been focused on the structural aspects (including design processes, metric selection, and ranking) and on the reporting aspects (including metric collection and ranking). The further development and use of the balanced scorecard to drive business decisions within an enterprise to align business strategy with IT operations has been limited.